Tag: management

Maxim Ilyakhov, Lyudmila Sarycheva “The New Rules of Business Correspondence”

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If anyone remembers, I really didn’t like Write, Shorten by Maxim Ilyakhov and Lyudmila Sarycheva, a book on editing texts. Judging by the number of likes my review received on Goodreads, I’m far from alone in this opinion. As a result, I had no intention of reading another book by these authors. However, a colleague first recommended it to me, then another gave it a high rating. So, I decided to give them a second chance—anything’s possible.

From the very first pages, I felt this might have been a mistake, although my opinion shifted slightly later on. As before, there are some practical tips in the book. But let’s break it down step by step.

The authors begin much like they did in their previous book: first, they highlight how poor the world of business correspondence has become, the old ways we were taught for years, and how outdated those norms are. Now, they claim, they’ll teach us how to do things right. At least this time, they spared us a pompous comic about their battle against evil. But the tendency to exaggerate and sometimes paint a bleak picture without much basis is still present right from the start.

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Josh Kaufman “The Personal MBA”

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A friend of mine recently decided to enroll in an MBA program. I was curious as to why. From my experience, I’ve noticed that while MBA holders often have solid foundational knowledge, they frequently lose out to those who have acquired these skills independently, especially through hands-on experience.

So, I checked out the course content and its requirements. It states that a certificate of English proficiency is absolutely essential. The thing is, in all my life, I’ve never bothered to get any such certificate. Yes, my English is far from perfect, I know. I work on it continuously, but I never got around to obtaining a certificate. Nonetheless, I work at a large international company and communicate with colleagues and partners in English daily, both verbally and in writing.

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Patrick Lencioni “Death by Meeting”

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Before diving into the book Death by Meeting, I’d like to share how I first became acquainted with the author’s work.

Patrick Lencioni is a very unconventional business writer and consultant. He is best known as the author of the bestseller The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. This isn’t a typical management book—many refer to it as a business novel. I’m not sure if Lencioni invented this style or if someone else had done it before him, but when I read the book, I found the approach intriguing. It’s a book about management, but written as a work of fiction about the life of a team. Essentially, he takes a business problem, “creates” a company and characters around it, and tells a story that illustrates how to solve the problem in question.

I read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team about five or six years ago, and I really liked it. That’s when I realized the author had earned his own spot on my “to-read” list.

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Kenneth Blanchard, William Onchen, Jr., Hal Burrows “The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey”

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Just a couple of weeks ago, I knew nothing about The One Minute Manager until a colleague told me about a book he had just read. He mentioned that, in his opinion, as a manager, I was already following all four rules for “managing monkeys.” That piqued my curiosity, and I decided to figure out what kind of monkeys I was supposedly dealing with.

Ken Blanchard, a well-known author of management books, coined the term One Minute Manager in his book of the same name. By this term, he refers to a highly productive leader who follows some fairly simple rules. Blanchard’s first book, co-authored with Spencer Johnson, sold millions of copies and has been translated into nearly 40 languages worldwide. It kicked off a series under the same name, in which Blanchard, collaborating with various business authors, presents different productivity methods.

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Jason Schreier “Blood, Sweat, and Pixels”

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A month ago, I celebrated my 10-year anniversary working at the game company Wargaming.net. However, my entire professional career actually began with video games, back when I used to write out the program for a computer version of Monopoly in a notebook. I never finished it—making games is tough, especially when all your work can vanish due to a faulty audio cassette where it was saved. But even my first programs were related to games: business simulations, educational, and card games. So, you could say I’ve been in the industry, with breaks, for over 25 years.

That’s why it was especially interesting for me to read Jason Schreier’s much-talked-about book Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, which, as its subtitle suggests, reveals “stories behind how video games are made.”

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Mike Pritula, Roman Zhikharev “Résumé for a Million”

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I have an interesting story connected with the book Résumé for a Million. I know both authors personally, as we worked together at Wargaming. I had already read some of Mike’s articles on résumés and hiring before, and as a manager who has conducted many interviews myself, I strongly disagreed with many of his conclusions and advice. We even had a few debates on the topic.

So, when it came to this book, I wasn’t just cautious—I was rather pessimistic. However, it’s not fair to criticize without reading. That’s why I decided to buy the book, read it, and then form my opinion.

From the title, you might expect the book to teach you how to write a résumé that will sell you for the highest price. This was, in fact, the general tone of Mike’s earlier articles on the subject. However, the book turned out to be much more than just about résumés—the authors themselves divided it into three parts.

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Peter Bregman “18 minutes. Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done”

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The book “18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done” by Peter Bregman had been recommended to me several times, although I no longer remember by whom. It’s about improving focus, avoiding distractions, and accomplishing what you set out to do.

Even though it’s written in a fairly easy-to-read style, I didn’t like the first half at all. It felt like a typical business book, full of fluff, self-praise, and similar things. Something along the lines of “I was a loser, but then I saw the light, and now everyone should follow my lead.” I’m exaggerating, of course, but that’s the feeling I got from the tone between the lines.

However, later on, the author switches to practical examples and more actionable advice.

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Misconceptions about Feedback

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One of the best articles on employee training and feedback. It challenges much of what we are taught by various “gurus” and what many companies implement in their corporate processes. It offers a fresh perspective on what happens within teams and with individuals. Interestingly, I have personally discovered and applied some of these principles intuitively, even when they contradicted official doctrine.

I highly recommend reading it: https://hbr.org/2019/03/the-feedback-fallacy

Trust and Loyalty

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Working in an international company, I’ve experienced cultural differences firsthand between various nationalities. A year ago, I wrote a review of The Culture Map, a book I constantly recommend to colleagues. However, this topic is so broad and fascinating that it keeps resurfacing, especially as the understanding of these differences allows me to notice them in the behavior of those around me almost daily.

Today, I’d like to delve deeper into differences in trust and loyalty. Instead of comparing everyone, let’s focus on the typical American and the typical Russian. By “Russians,” I mean people from the former USSR, as this is how we are often viewed abroad. Of course, this is a diverse mix, and we’re not all the same (for example, I can clearly see differences between Russians and Belarusians, and within Russia itself, there are plenty of distinctions due to the sheer size of the country).

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David J. Anderson “Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business”

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Kanban is a flexible management tool that originated from Toyota. Over the past few decades, it has become very popular in the IT industry, alongside other agile methodologies. David Anderson has worked in IT for 30 years and has been an advocate of the Kanban methodology for many years. The title of the book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business, suggests that we’ll learn both about the methodology and the best ways to apply it. At least, those were my expectations. Especially since it’s praised by various experts in the annotations.

However, I found the book difficult from the very first pages. I pushed through to the end to form a complete opinion, but it only confirmed my initial thoughts rather than changing them.

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